Alberto Giacometti, City Square, 1948

"He carried the revolver in his belt at the front and wore his parka unzipped. The mummied dead everywhere. The flesh cloven along the bones, the ligaments dried to tug and taut as wires. Shriveled and drawn like latterday bogfolk, their faces of boiled sheeting, the yellowed palings of their teeth. They were discalced to a man like pilgrims of some common order for all their shoes were long since stolen." - The Road, Cormac McCarthy

Lost. Lonely. Fragile. Alberto Giacometti's figures have an aura of alien beauty. Like mirages in an endless desert, the shadow-people of Giacometti's City Square do not seem to be human, but rather resemble wraiths wondering a barren landscape. They evoke the deeper, darker essence of humanity. From the time that Giacometti first developed his mature style - the thin shadowy sculptures that most people associate with him - he became obsessed with capturing in an instant the world around him. Now whether this image of the world came from something that he saw in things, or whether he wished to capture the feeling that things gave him, even Giacometti did not know.

But one thing remains clear: In a world where once great cities lay in ruins from the war, and wanderers shuffled through the wreckage, Giacometti's wraiths wandered beside them. The Existentialist symbols of a world wracked by destruction remain even today, cast and trapped in a bronze tomb. Perhaps it is the sense that Giacometti's figures represent something supernatural, that the viewer is not quite alone when standing before works such as City Square, that haunts and captivates the imagination. Forever frozen in time, Giacometti's bronze ghosts stand as a testament to the power of sculpture. They are beautiful. They are horrifying.